In Kate Briggs’ The Long Form, a day takes place. A mother wakes up with her daughter, and proceeds to undertake her quotidian tasks. At the same time, she embarks upon a reflection upon the ways the everyday is made. As the rhythms of motherhood prove fertile ground for rumination upon care, love, and creation, the making of the day becomes analogous to the making of a novel, which becomes the material of the novel itself. Briggs seizes upon a lack of action in order to build a space for the slow and spontaneous wanderings of the mind. Navigating multiple levels of storytelling, time, modes of writing, and modes of thought, she elegantly sweeps through the space of the text and the history of the written word as her character sweeps through the house.
About the speakers:
Kate Briggs is the translator of two volumes of Roland Barthes’s lecture and seminar notes at the Collège de France: The Preparation of the Novel and How to Live Together, both published by Columbia University Press. She teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. The Long Form, her debut novel, follows This Little Art, a genre-bending essay on translation. In 2021, Kate Briggs was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize.
Yasmine Seale is a writer and translator based in Paris. Her essays on literature, art and film have been published in Harper’s, The Nation, Paris Review, and elsewhere. She is the author, with Robin Moger, of Agitated Air: Poems after Ibn Arabi (Tenement Press). Her translations from the Arabic include The Annotated Arabian Nights (W. W. Norton) and Something Evergreen Called Life, a collection of poems by Rania Mamoun (Action Books). She is currently a fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination, where she is completing a translation of The Dove’s Necklace by Ibn Hazm, an essay on the nature of love written in 11th-century Cordoba.
Important information: The discussion will be available both online and in person. While the conversation will happen in person (Briggs and Seale will appear in the Reading Room), the Library will stream the conversation on Zoom for a live viewing experience. Both in-person and online attendees will be able to pose questions.
This event requires advance registration.
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